A Single Act of Cowardice
by Miss Ming
Summary: Sasuke Uchiha was not the only survivor of the Uchiha massacre. I survived as well. i ran away, became a coward. and when I did, something unexpected happened.


**Kurome**

I thought I had been really smart, going to the academy, becoming a genin. I had gotten my hitai-ate today and was so proud. My day had been spent celebrating with my few friends. It was getting dark by the time I started home. As I neared the clan gates unease tickled in the pit of my stomach. My first warning was the smell. The second, the muffled sounds of dying men, women and children. A woman who I knew vaguely was killed right around the corner from me by an orange mask. I stifled a scream as she fell. I watched as her blood spilled out into the streets and the light go out of her eyes. It was too horrible to comprehend. So I became a coward.

I hid in a rain barrel while it had happened. The screams of my clan as they fought against the monster that slaughtered everyone. Once someone fell against my barrel and blood dropped into the tiny amount of water that was left in the bottom of the barrel. Several times during the night I heard footsteps so close that I had to bite my knuckle until it bleed to stop myself from screaming.

By the time dawn came I was half frozen to death and almost mad with shock, I climbed out to be greeted by the blood soaked streets of my clan. The stench hit me, the smell of revealed innards, spilled blood and death. I fell to my knees and tried not to throw up.

After a moment I got up and began running. I couldn't stay here. Not with this, this horror. I ran as fast as I could, past the clan gates, not caring if anyone saw me. I ran through the village streets with no particular direction in mind, I just ran. When I found myself at the village gates, I continued running until I collapsed.

A bird landed on my outstretched hand, pulling me into startled wakefulness. My lips cracked as I licked them and my mouth tasting like month old laundry. The bird took flight as I sat up. I reached up and touched my new hitai-ate and cried.

_Coward, _my mind hissed. _You hid while they died_.

Peeling myself off the ground, I looked around. All around me the forest was waking up, ready for a new day. Ignorant of my troubles.

_How could you?_

I tore my hitai-ate off and stared at my reflection in the only days old metal. Black eyes stared back up at me, accusing. Tears tracked down my face as I thought about my friends and family now dead in those blood soaked streets. A strangled cry escaped my throat and I threw my hitai-ate as far away as I could. Ninja didn't abandon their comrades; I should have helped my clan, not hid.

_You should have died instead of them._

Slowly, I got to my feet like an actor without a role to play. Now what to do? I wondered.

Picking a direction at random, I began walking. And tried to ignore the steadily growing voice in my head.

_Coward. Coward. COWARD_.

I ended up on the edges of a civilian town two days later. I swapped my shirt with my clan symbol on it for a plain brown t-shirt. As I went to put my old shirt up in place of the one I had taken, my head spun with hunger.

I sat down on the ground, hard. Food. I had some kunai, shuriken and ninja wire I could hunt with...

_What? You want to LIVE?! How preposterous. Just lie down and die. COWARD._

Voices. Voices were coming. I picked myself off the ground and hurried back into the trees.

"As I was saying darling... the crops should be quite good this year."

They sounded so much like mother and father. I grimaced, trying not to let tears flow. I ran back into the trees trying to get away from the pain that these two innocent people were causing me. I didn't get far before tripping over a rock and landing face first into the ground.

_Idiot. You ran without looking? What, a pair of farmers going to stab you to death?_

"Shut up." I whispered. As I picked myself off the ground, I heard running water. For a moment I stared numbly in the direction of the sound before picking myself up and walking towards it.

The stream was wide and clear. Pulling out a kunai from my school pouch they weren't the sharpest, but it would do for catching fish.

At Dusk I found myself frying a fish with some water cress that I had found.

_You didn't even have the guts to check if there were any survivors. _I ate my dinner in silence; save for the horrible voice that had taken up residence in my head. "Go away." I muttered. I would not cry, I thought as I dumped dirt over my fire to put it out. Standing up, I began to follow the stream wherever it led.

I carried on like this for days. When the stream eventually ended at a small spring, I said my goodbyes to it.

"_Look at you. All teary over leaving a bit of water. Idiotic coward."_

I spun around, eyes searching for where the voice came from. "Who's there?" my voice echoed slightly off the rocks and ancient trees around the spring's clearing.

"_You tremble at the very thought of facing an enemy!"_

My mouth suddenly became desert-dry and my hands shook so hard that I could barely hold my kunai at all. "I-I-Is that what you are?" my heart hammered in my chest like it a hundred drum chorus. "A-An enemy?" tears of fear began to well up and cloud my vision.

The shadows moved.

I forgot how to breathe. As a pair of red eyes stared at me from in the shadows, the kunai in my hand slipped from my grasp.

"_A cowardly louse like you may call me Akame."_ The shadows bulged out and for a moment I could see the outline of a face before it vanished into the light.

"Gone." I gasped, tears running down my face. I collapsed to the ground, gasping and coughing. "He's gone! It's okay! He's gone!" I whispered to my self to keep the gushing panic at bay.

It was some time later that I realised that I was in a foetal position. It took even more time for the shivering to abate so I could leave my beautiful spring which had given me water for so long.

My bottom lip trembled and I held back tears as hard as I could. Was that Akame the one who killed my clan? If so, then there was no place in the fire country for me. Picking out south from the sun, I began heading off.

After walking for what must have been a fortnight, I ended up on a desolate coastline. Salty wind whistling through my hair. I wandered slowly along the windswept sand, stumbling once in a while. Green grasses slowly turned to endless plains of heat scorched sand. As night fell I found a rock formation with a little alcove in it. I huddled into the alcove and sat quietly with my thoughts.

Dying by desert didn't actually seem that bad... I would see my family again. If they'd accept a coward like me into the after life.

_That's right you coward. There's no one here for you anymore, so why do you even try?_

I huddled down in the darkness as the as the desert's night took hold.

The days were monotonous in their burning, baking, scorching sun and sand. The only shelter provided by occasional rock formations. In a way the nights were worse, freezing temperatures, rough ground pressing up against sunburned skin. All through it were the now incessant taunts of Akame.

_If you had any guts, you would have killed yourself. Not let the desert do your dirty work._

I collapsed at the foot of a small cliff in the afternoon sun on the third day. My body shaking with tears that couldn't come.

"_So the Coward is finished, eh?"_ a voice off to my right asked. It took almost all my strength to turn my head to look.

"A-Akame?" I rasped. The action of speaking split open my sun charred lips, leaving them bleeding into the sand. A kid who looked almost exactly like me sat on a rock barely two meters away. He jumped down and walked slowly towards me. _"Look at you."_ he sneered as he crouched down centimetres in front of my face. _"Didn't you run from your village because you wanted to live?"_

My eyes burned as his words hit me like rocks through glass. "n-n-not true." I coughed; dry and rasping like the desert I had collapsed in.

_"Then tell me, what was the point of running?"_

I opened my mouth to explain, but my through was now to dry to form a single sound.

How could I tell this boy that I had been terrified, when I couldn't even speak? He tsked and stood up. _"You useless lump of flesh. I hope the vultures eat you slowly."_ He walked off, fading into the distance. I weakly raised a shaking hand in a futile attempt to stop him but my strength failed me. As he left, the world narrowed down to a point and then to nothing.

_Akame _

He was weak. That idiot. First he didn't stand and fight like the rest of his clan, and then he ran away. Now they were in a desert, what had the idiot been thinking? I'd watched and felt Kurome loose consciousness for what would be the last time if I didn't do anything about it.

"_Your body's mine now, Kurome. No complaining from here on out."_ Taking his others body was almost a mixture of waking up from the sense dulled world that he'd living in and diving into jelly.

The scorching sun was the first thing I felt, pounding down on my new skin. _Pain_. The hollow nothingness in my stomach. _Hunger._ The immense weight that pressed me to the ground. _Gravity._ The rasping dryness in my throat! Thirst!

"I have a body!" I rasped in exaltation. With the hands that were once the coward Kurome's, I pushed my self off the ground and into a standing position. Stumbling towards the cliff, all the while half-hysterical with bliss. There would be water there and I would _survive._

I was able to find a tiny puddle of water deep within a crevice. It wet my lips and soothed my aching throat.

Sitting with my back against the bottom of the cliff I watched shadows lengthen and the sun set. My red eyes narrowed. On the farthest horizon I could see a lump, too big to be another rock formation. With determined steps in my new body I started off. I. Would. Survive.

"**Akame?"**

I jerked violently. "Get lost you miserable lump. You wanted to die." I wobbled slightly as I swiped my hand agitation. "You had your turn. Now its mine."

I could almost feel him flinch, even though I refused to take my eyes off the lump in the distance.

"**Wh-what are you?"**

That made me stop. "Are you thick!? Has being lily livered made you lily headed as well!?" I turned around to where I could see a ghost like vision of Kurome staring at me. "I'm YOU! You idiot!" after the outburst I put a hand to my mouth to wipe away the blood that had begun to flow from my cracked lips, opened by the outburst. "Now, why don't you just disappear?"

"**B-B-But..."**

I turned my back on Kurome. Leaving him behind me as I strode through the starlit night on weak but determined legs towards what I hoped would be a village of some sort. "Because unlike you... I will not give up."

I fell many, many, many times that night. And each time I fell, the distance I could walk before falling again got shorter.

It was almost dawn when I couldn't push myself any further. The mound was so close.

"No. No! I can't die here!" even though it felt like I was shouting it came out like a whisper.

**Why?**

"Because... we've only just begun to live." I didn't need to see Kurome's face in the dawn light to see his shock.

My eyes spotted some movement on the mound. "Looks like someone lives there after all." I gasped, my head twisting to get a better look at the people coming. A rasping chuckle started to rise up through my dehydrated chest and came out sounding like a saw going through wood.

"**They're going to stare."**

"At what?" my voice, barely a whisper.

"**Your sharingan." **Kurome shivered. "**They scare me. They'll scare them too Akame."** The people were closer now, and I could see that they were ninja, suna ninja. Kurome moved into my line of vision. "**You have to turn them off."**

"I can't." I rasped "you lily livered idiot. Akame." I broke off, panting. "_Red eyes. It's part of who I am"._ My rescuers were oh so close now. _"You. Kurome. Use this thing. Your eyes are black. Mine aren't."_

"**You're giving me my body back?"** I shut my eyes as my rescuers arrived beside me.

"_No you idiot. Mine now. You had your chance, I'm loaning it to you"._ I could feel Kurome weighing up his options.

**Deal.**

I felt pushed aside as Kurome took control and the pain hunger thirst and feeling of gravity disappeared. I opened my eyes and watched as Kurome in my body was searched for weapons which were confiscated, then hoisted onto one of the suna ninja's backs.

I watched as the group walked towards suna's walls. An Uchiha would not be welcome there. Kurome would be hunted down and killed as a spy.

"_You better not die, wimp willed pustule of puke! Otherwise I'll haunt you till the ends of the earth!" _I roared, shaking my fist before sitting down on the sand that I could only faintly feel. I watched as the desert wind picked up sand and tossed it into infinity. Guess this would be all I would be doing for a long while.

"_Damn. Back to being a fly on the wall."_ I muttered to myself.

* * *

okay, this will most likely stay a oneshot, but if you readers like it review and I'll continue.


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